Sarasota Memorial Hospital opens new tower

Construction of $250 million project was bright spot in Great Recession.

By JOHN HIELSCHER

While the Great Recession forced many businesses to cut back just to survive, Sarasota Memorial Hospital embarked on its most ambitious expansion in decades.

That $250 million improvement project reaches its fruition this week, as the hospital begins moving the first of several medical units into its new Courtyard Tower.

The nine-story structure will replace 220 beds and operations that, in some cases, date to the early 1950s. In their place, the hospital has installed state-of-the art equipment and technology designed to meet the community's evolving health care needs.

“This has been long awaited,” said Gwen MacKenzie, the hospital's chief executive officer. “When I came here in 2005, one of things I heard loud and clear was the need for the rejuvenation and renovation of this main campus.”

More than a decade in planning and construction, the new bed tower comes as health care providers throughout Florida and the nation are trying to differentiate themselves with improved services.

Many hospitals, like Sarasota Memorial, also took advantage of the recession to update buildings and buy equipment at reduced rates.

Just as significantly, the new tower opens as hospitals throughout the U.S. are bracing for challenges and changes that will be part of the Affordable Care Act, a 2010 law that begins to take effect in earnest next year and will be fully implemented in 2015.

Sarasota Memorial is adapting ahead of those pending changes.

The Courtyard Tower's two-floor lobby, with an information desk, patient registration area, pre-admission center and other services, opened in April.

On Monday, the hospital's orthopedic unit will move to the ninth floor, followed by the hospital's mother-baby unit to the sixth floor on Sept. 24.

Cardiac acute and cardiac progressive units are scheduled to relocate to the tower in October, and the labor and delivery and acclaimed neonatal intensive care units will complete their moves in early November.

Job site

When Sarasota Memorial started the improvement project, commercial construction in Southwest Florida had virtually shut down because of the real estate crash and recession.

“We had to make all these decisions on spending a lot of money when everything was tanking, at least in Sarasota County,” said hospital board Chairman Dick Merritt.

“We had a $250 million project staring us in the face that was needed to be done, because it had been postponed for a number of years.”

As a result, the project became one of the region's largest job sites.

Hospital officials estimate 550 workers were employed during the tower's five years of construction, with more than 400 of them from the Sarasota area.

“When they broke ground, that really was the depth of the building downturn here. Nobody had work,” said Kerry Kirschner, executive director of the pro-business Argus Foundation.

“We used to kid that we had the only construction crane within 50 miles, which was true,” added Merritt.

The tower was not the only capital project the hospital had embarked on at a time when construction was derailed, either.

A new central energy plant was completed in 2009, and the vertical surgery expansion/central sterile area debuted in mid-2011.

Completion of the tower, with construction valued at $186 million, caps the project at the region's only publicly owned hospital.

The project was funded by $150 million in fixed-rate bonds that are not backed by taxpayer dollars. The hospital issued bonds in 2007 that included $50 million to help pay for the new central energy plant, and two years later issued 30-year, uninsured bonds that generated $100 million to finance the tower.

The balance of the project's cost was covered by philanthropic donations and by hospital profits re-invested into the capital budget, MacKenzie said.

But before the project could be approved, the hospital also needed to shore up its financial condition. To boost revenue, it proposed and backed several tax increases. Eventually, its bond rating was also raised, which allowed it to issue bonds at more favorable interest rates.

Hospitals grow

The 4,000-employee Sarasota Memorial was one of the few hospitals on Florida's west coast to take on a major expansion during the tough economic times.

Tampa General Hospital, by comparison, opened the $170 million Bayshore Pavilion in 2008, a project well under way before the recession took hold.

But several other hospitals are in the midst of renovations or expansions.

Most notably, All Children's Hospital, in St. Petersburg, is implementing a campus master plan that involves demolition and rehabilitation of several of the hospital's buildings. It is also acquiring land to build its own medical tower.

Back at Sarasota Memorial, the 225,000-square-foot Courtyard Tower will sizably expand the number of private rooms for patients.

But the hospital will have little time to break in its new facilities. Orthopedic surgeons have already scheduled nearly two dozen operations for Monday, Sept. 9. After their procedures, those patients will be moved into the new ninth-floor unit, which has 28 private and eight semi-private rooms.

Some patients even postponed their elective orthopedic surgeries so they could be among the first inside the tower.

“We moved up the opening date by two months because of so many questions we had from people waiting to have their knees or hips replaced,” MacKenzie said.

The neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) on the tower's fifth floor will offer 33 private rooms, which hospital officials say will be a big improvement over the current ward-style NICU, which was built in 1952.

Currently, families often must cram together in a pair of open rooms with little privacy to visit their premature babies and critically ill newborns, or consult with doctors and nurses.

That unit in Sarasota Memorial represents the county's only hospital that delivers babies — an average of 3,000 per year. Two other floors in the new tower will be devoted to labor and delivery and for mother-baby suites, with 30 private rooms and one semi-private one.

Cardiac units will be housed on two floors. The hospital treats more than 65,000 heart patients each year, making its cardiology program the region's largest by far.

Last year the hospital formed a partnership with Columbia University to increase expertise, research and training in cardiac care.

An attraction

But while the new space and upgraded equipment will almost certainly be welcomed by patients and hospital staff, Kirschner contends the new bed tower will have wider repercussions for the region.

Top-notch medical care, he believes, will become an even greater component of the community's future economy and lead to further population growth.

“When people move, if they have children they look for good school systems. If they are retired, they look at what medical facilities are there,” he said.

The tower not only will improve patient care, officials said, but will help attract and retain prominent doctors, nurses, specialists, researchers and other health care providers.

“We do clinical research, we develop new initiatives, we are always on top of technology,” MacKenzie said. “Physicians who come here to be recruited are often surprised at the depth and breadth of what we have, given that this is a community hospital.”

The tower also has been built to withstand up to a Category 3 hurricane, officials said. Impact-resistant windows can handle winds up to 165 miles per hour.

Gresham Smith and Partners of Tampa was the tower's architect and engineer, and Skanska USA Building of Tampa was general contractor.

“We want this to be considered an invaluable community asset,” MacKenzie said.